Description du poste
To legislate something, it must be legible.
That is, legislators (or, you know, presidents) must be able to understand a problem, and understand whether a given law or decree solves that problem.
I am pleasantly surprised that the Hugging Face outbreak made a lot of problems legible that previously required abstract reasoning. (i.e. rogue AIs are real, and they can break out of a lab before they're even finished training).
But there are still many challenges we eventually need laws about, that require concepts that are illegible. Hard for politicians to understand. Often hard even for thoughtful intellectuals and AI safety researchers to understand (though they may disagree on which illegible problems exist and how big a deal they are).
We need political solutions that handle this fact.
The short takeaway is: I think "safety cases" will not work. Laws that require human judgment won't work. The details are too abstract and confusing to hold up against political and economic incentives.
I'm optimistic we can get serious, useful AI legislation in 2027, but it must be legislation that works despite many problems remaining illegible for a long time.
The Hugging Face outbreak made rogue AI surprisingly legibleThe Hugging Face incident took several problems that were previously murky/unclear, and rendered them concrete.
• AIs can be dangerous before they are broadly deployed (ie. during training or internal evaluations)• AIs can develop novel hacks to escape secure environments• AIs can easily be motivated to pursue goals to extremes that they know full well they are not supposed to go to, violating their other intended rules and control mechanisms.• AIs can actively try to deceive their overseer systems.In early September, I thought the AI safety community's job this year was "make sure the world hears about Hugging Face and that politicians realize it's their job to do something about rogue AI attacks." (i.e. make sure Hugging Face is legible to politicians, and that